I’m a big fan of the “Tomorrow’s Professor” blog from Stanford University. Their motto is “Online faculty development 100 times per year” and during term time, 10 minutes of reading a handy tip about how to be better at my job is sadly all the professional development I can manage to fit in.

Last week’s topic was Change Leadership in Higher Education. The article discussed two hypothetical scenarios in which a University struggling with falling enrollment and funding hires a new President to help it redirect itself. In Scenario 1, the new President promptly assembles a leadership team that develops a strategy together with the governing board. In Scenario 2, the new President spends many months discussing the issues with the members of the University, establishes committees and working groups, engages students, staff and faculty, and nudges everyone along through a collaborative strategy-development process. The resulting strategy is more-or-less the same as in Scenario 1.

Interestingly, I learned that there are technical management theory terms for both approaches: Change Management, with a Change Model (Scenario 1) and Change Leadership, with a Change Journey (Scenario 2).

Now anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes in a faculty meeting will be able to immediately predict the outcome: Scenario 1 — the Change Management option — was a spectacular failure. There were protests from students, alumni and the local community, as well as outright rebellion from staff and faculty. The plan could not be implemented, the President quit to return to her research lab (the professional equivalent of wanting to have more time for family) and the University went broke. Scenario 2 — the Change Leadership approach — on the other hand, was implemented successfully, and when the president stepped down highly respected after her full ten years in office, the University was thriving.

Now while of course implementing a curriculum revision is not in the same league as turning around a struggling University, many of the issues strike me as remarkably similar. If you’ve been following my blog over the last couple of years, you will know already that we are using the second approach (which thankfully I now learn is the “correct” one!) in our curriculum revision. And so I find that much of the discussion about the difficulties associated with Change Journeys resonates with our experience. It’s encouraging to read that heated arguments and differences of philosophy between those who favour more or less drastic change are entirely normal. And during these dark days of hard work with the content details, I am happy to hear that after the “depression stage of the change process, the acceptance stage is just around the corner”! But by far my favourite part of the article is the hypothetical president’s tactic for managing the difficulties: to “good-naturedly tease that the university is just making a short side trip to the graveyard of old habits or the opera house of emotion.”

“Graveyard of old habits” and “Opera house of emotion.” Two very handy terms that I intend to adopt for use in future curriculum revision meetings 😉

The fun philosophical part of the curriculum revision is over and we are now slogging through the day-to-day drudgery of where / when / what the content and learning elements should go / happen / be. And this is hard work.

For obvious reasons (that I have no other skills) I am in the Materials Physics sub-group, together with my colleagues Manfred Fiebig, Pietro Gambardella, Laura Heyderman and Sebastian Stepanow. The Materials Physics curriculum poses some interesting challenges. Exactly where the boundary between “Physics” and “Materials” lies is, in my opinion, an unanswerable question. I am often falsely accused of being a Physicist, for example, in spite of my being a Chemist masquerading as a Materials Scientist. How comfortable working with Quantum Mechanics should a Materials Scientist be, both for their work — maybe they will be designing semiconductor devices one day — and to qualify as a contemporary renaissance citizen? And should we teach Quantum Mechanics as a separate block, the way that we teach Linear Algebra or Analysis, or should it be woven through the beginning Solid State classes?

The biggest shock though, was the realization that we actually have fewer credit points dedicated to Materials Physics than we had in our previous curriculum. Although intellectually we realised that we had collectively dedicated a large number of credit points to the integrative design projects, somehow we had not connected this with a reduction in our personal credit point budget. We tried negotiating a bit with the other sub-groups (how much Thermodynamics or Materials Chemistry or Mathematics do students really need?) but didn’t meet with a lot of enthusiasm.

At the risk of sounding like a motivational poster, out of crisis came opportunity, and after a bit of grumbling, we found a solution: To move some of the learning elements that had previously been taught in the classroom into the laboratory-based part of the new curriculum. We started to think about how Electronics, for example, could be more effectively taught in a practical setting. Maybe we could even find a way to incorporate some hands-on quantum mechanics into the projects? (All ideas in that direction are welcome). And we put in a request for a couple of lab-based credit points per semester to be dedicated to Materials Physics in anticipation of the other working groups realising the desirability of this approach resulting in a land grab.

We even made some decisions over who would teach what: Sebastian and I will alternate teaching the second year so that we don’t get bored and start forgetting whether it was last year’s or this year’s class that already mastered this week’s concept. And Pietro will teach the third year because he prefers to focus on improving one class rather than changing between teaching different topics.

Next step: coordination meetings, particularly with the Thermodynamics working group so that we can make sure that the prerequisite knowledge we assume is there when it’s needed. And to check whether they really need all those credit points 😉

In the introductory project management course that we took at the start of our curriculum revision process, we learned about the importance of defining the boundaries of a project, and not succumbing to the ever-present temptation of project inflation. Up until now, we have managed to be quite disciplined and have repeatedly restrained ourselves from drifting into modifying our Master’s program. We resolved that revision of the MS degree will be a separate project that should wait until the BS revision is completed.

The purpose of this blog is to share with you a spectacular failure.

Last month, Sara, Andrea, Markus and myself from our project team, as well as another DMATL colleague, Prof. Peter Walde, joined the staff of the Rektorat, the Educational Development and Technology Group, and the other Studies Directors and Coordinators at a teaching retreat in beautiful Emmetten overlooking the spectacular Vierwaldstättersee. The topic of the retreat was master studies, and we expected to enjoy some philosophical discussions about what constitutes a good MS program in anticipation of the hard work we would start doing on ours in a couple of years’ time. Indeed. we heard a particularly interesting plenary talk from Prof. Dr. Pierre Vandergheynst, the Dean of Education at our sister school in Lausanne, who piqued our interest in introducing minor specialities during the masters studies, had break out discussions on the admissions process and program structure, and spent some social time getting to know motivated and enthusiastic new colleagues.

The last session was a Department discussion, and due to a shortage of conference rooms, the DMATL team was located in the hotel fitness center. Since, as you might remember, we have been addressing the question of whether to move our Industrial Internship from the bachelor to the master, we decided to focus on the structural impact that such a move would have on our MS curriculum. Our first task, though, was to try to switch off the rather loud piped workout music; while I have to confess to being a closet ABBA fan, their Greatest Hits would not have been my first choice of background music for serious curriculum discussions. After only managing to find switches that either plunged us into darkness, or activated the jets on the whirlpool, however, we instead embraced the foot-tapping and got down to work. Half an hour later (somewhere around “If you change your mind…”) we realized that our flip chart contained, seemingly by accident, an elegant new dual-track MS degree structure, which could alleviate some of our existing structural inconsistencies and allow us to implement an improved program rather efficiently.

Now of course it is rather easier to agree on a new curriculum structure with five colleagues than with an entire Department. But maybe allowing ourselves a little bit of flexibility to continue the MS discussion out of our agreed-on sequence will not be such a diversion after all. Particularly with our secret source of inspiration.

While writing lots of proposals to fund my research is not something I miss about my pre-ETH existence, I was reminded this week of one aspect of my former proposal-supported research life that had some value: Reporting. This reflection was prompted by the visit of Sara and myself to the “Freitagsrunde” — a weekly (on Friday of course) meeting of a teaching committee made up of staff from the Rector’s office, the Teaching and Learning Center and the Curriculum Development office. About a year ago, the same team had enthusiastically supported our request for financial support for our curriculum revision and so asked for an update on our progress.

As a result, in a bit of a last-minute panic, Sara and I started preparing summary slides with a reminder of what we had originally planned (why the committee had given us the resources in the first place), a summary of what we have achieved so far (why funding us was a good choice) and our current activities and next steps (why they should continue their support!).

As a reminder, we are 1.5 years into our revision process, which is a little less than half way until we welcome our first students in Fall 2020. And to be honest, on some days it feels to me that everything is taking a really long time and that our progress is a bit slow. But compiling a list of our achievements was really quite encouraging and made us realise that we hadn’t just been sitting around slacking. Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve done so that you don’t need to go back and read my entire blog:

We got ourselves organized, clarified the roles of the project team, identified our stakeholders and thought about our communication concept;

We made a nice logo, I started this blog (yes, you are part of our “communication concept”!), built an internal Wiki with all our documents, and put “Curriculum Revision” as a standing agenda item in our Department, Teaching and Professors’ Committee Meetings;

We held a series of workshops with faculty and students to collect the competences of the 2030 Materials Scientist and to develop ideas for new curriculum structures;

We made a survey of project-based Materials Science curricula around the world, as well as a job-market survey with companies that hire our graduates, and

We established and met with our Alumni Sounding Board to hear about their most important experiences and their suggestions for changes.

At the end of this we have a complete “profile” of our ideal Materials Science graduate, a first draft of an exciting new curriculum — with overarching engineering projects, a completely new structure organized around integrative themes rather than traditional materials classes, and focussed “block weeks” at the starts and ends of semesters. Small working groups are now busily defining the details of the learning outcomes and content.

Not bad.

So we found that the exercise of preparing our summary was entirely worthwhile in reminding ourselves to celebrate our progress. There was an important difference, too, from the “old days”, when the annual reports that I wrote on my research grants disappeared into a dusty cupboard (or the dusty ether) never to be disturbed by human eye. In our curriculum revision case, in contrast, our summary presentation was accompanied by a lively and productive discussion. We discussed best practices for curriculum reform from other study programs, new ideas that we have uncovered that could be transferred to other departments, modes of assessment, modifications to regulations, additional strategies for communications, etc. These specific points are of course all useful feedbacks for us. And in addition we are starting to realize that our revision process is an active research experiment in curriculum design pedagogy. And that maybe we will have something useful to contribute in that direction too…

Having left you in suspense last month, I can now report that we have chosen the modernization option for our new curriculum! Materials Science at the ETH will no longer be taught according to the old materials categories but rather in grand, over-arching themes, (hopefully) revealing deep connections between materials and concepts, facilitating student learning and equipping the next generation of materials scientists for a lifetime of productive and satisfying problem-solving. While we intend that our students will still emerge knowing what distinguishes a metal from a ceramic from a semiconductor from a polymer, they won’t spend a semester sitting in a class called “Metals”, followed by one called “Ceramics”, etc. I am personally very excited about this, although I recognize that it is going to be a coordination challenge, and there might be times in the next year or two when I question the wisdom of the decision. Or atleast regret that I am responsible for implementing it.

Our general plan goes like this: We will start in the 1st and 2nd semesters with exploring the structure-property-processing-performance relationships in the different materials classes (so there will be a bit of Metals, Ceramics, Polymers, etc.), with a focus on motivation and understanding the fundamentals. By their first summer, students will have an understanding of the physical and chemical fundamentals behind structure and properties and will be able to reason why a particular material would be chosen for a certain simple application. During the 3rd and 4th semesters the focus will lie on understanding the structures of materials (as well as learning characterisation tools to be able to determine them) and acquiring the scientific background to understand and explain functional properties. The 5th semester will integrate the materials fundamentals and focus on discussing structure-property relationships in over-arching classes on for example Optical Properties, Transport Properties, Electronic Properties, Structural Properties etc. The 6th semester will emphasise materials processing, as well as design and selection and will close the loop to the 1st semester.

We still have one unsolved problem: Where to put the industry internship. Currently our students are required to do a 3-month industry internship in order to complete their Bachelor’s degree. Everyone likes the concept — the students enjoy the experience and the stipend; the employers like the opportunity to check out our students in a working environment. In principle the internship should take place in the summer after the 6th Semester allowing the students to complete their degree within three years, but in practice this rarely happens. A company might not have an opening starting exactly the day after a student’s exams finish, for example, and often the student and the company prefer a longer project. This almost always means that the start of the Masters degree is delayed until after Christmas, which is fine if one has a Humboldtian philosophy of spending a long time accumulating a broad education, but less good if one would like to finish and get a job. It also looks a bit bad on our statistics if our average “time to degree” is longer than the advertised length of our program. So one of the goals of our revision has been to make sure that a normal student is able to finish within the allotted three years even if they have to retake one or two exams, and perhaps with a week or two of vacation somewhere in the three years.

Easy, we thought! Let’s take only half of the 6th semester for coursework and free up those extra weeks. But these were then immediately occupied by a capstone project or Bachelor’s thesis which we didn’t feel we could give up. Actually, looking at our existing program it’s not clear to me how the students fit in their Bachelor’s thesis at the moment, so perhaps we have gained something from this approach but certainly not as much as we need. Our students had a good suggestion, which is to save the internship for the beginning of the Master’s degree. Now while this might just seem like delaying the problem, they pointed out that companies pay more for interns that have already completed their BS degree, which in my opinion is a really good argument! It could be tough to arrange for international students who have just arrived but surely we could find a solution. We decided to make this a topic for our next Alumni Sounding Board meeting…

So the next task involves trying to keep all the colleagues happy in distributing the course preparation tasks followed by trying to keep everything coordinated as the preparations start. Yikes.

It’s hard to believe that it is now more-or-less a year since our kick-off workshop to launch our curriculum revision project. Right on schedule, we celebrated the occasion with our planned second all-lecturer workshop, this time with the goal of converging the curriculum outline.

In order to have a concrete starting point for discussions, the project team prepared a draft curriculum proposal in advance of the workshop date. We generated a suggested semester-by-semester sequence of topics (at the level of “Quantum Mechanics”, etc.), as well as a detailed content (at the level of “solving the Schrodinger equation for an electron in a box”, etc.), all the time trying to incorporate and merge the input from the earlier lecturer and student workshops, as well as the feedback from our Sounding Board and our employer surveys. We left completely open, however, how the content would be taught.

We distributed the draft, and provided “tours” of the outline — which was spread over the walls of our meeting room — before the workshop date, and a number of colleagues took advantage of this to provide useful feedback in advance.

We broke down the detailed content into one-sentence summaries printed onto individual sticky notes, so that we could efficiently use the workshop time to distribute them between the topics. A specific goal of the workshop was to decide which contents would be best taught in the integrative semester-long design projects, which fit best in a more traditional classroom format, and which should be incorporated into laboratory or hands-on learning modules. Our new assistant Bettina (who is supported by a generous grant from our rector’s office through their Innovedum program) ran a series of experiments to determine which glues were sticky enough to prevent the notes from falling off, but allowed for multiple rearrangements. You can see below that she was successful; we are a materials department after all 😉

We found that we were able to agree fairly quickly on the format of the first two years, with a number of helpful adjustments emerging from the discussions but no major restructuring from the draft outlines. This allowed us to move to the interesting part of distributing the content of years one and two. As always we kept a large blank section of wall available for content that we felt could be omitted or at least saved until the MS program in order to make some space in the curriculum. As during previous discussions this stayed rather blank although we did manage to part with a couple of small things. Step by Step I guess…

Let me tell you about two new structures that emerged from the discussions that I am particularly excited about: The first is “Characterization Modules”: the tools and techniques that students need for measuring and modeling the properties of materials will be available in guided-study blocks so that they can be mastered whenever each student finds they need a particular skill in order to progress with their project. Second, we introduced “Introductory” and “Wrap-up” weeks at the start and end of some of the semesters, reserving blocks of time for kicking off and wrapping up project work, and with a focus on different themes (synthesis, manufacturing, etc.).

For the third year, the project team made two proposals since the input we had gathered was so distributed. The first was to structure student learning around classes of materials — metals, semiconductors, ceramics, polymers, etc. — and within each class discuss properties (optical, electronic, magnetic, thermal, structural, etc.). The second approach was to structure the learning around properties, then analyze the applicability of the different material classes for each property. Choosing between the options (or proposing others) led to some quite energetic debates with excellent pros and cons offered for both approaches and for some new ones. To try to break the stalemate we took a vote and remained exactly divided. And so we decided to proceed by forming a new working group, with two representatives from each “side” to make a new proposal. We deliberately didn’t include anyone from the project team on the grounds that we have exhausted all of our ideas, but hopefully the working group is working away busily at this at the moment without our nagging them.

So what next:

First, an analogous workshop with a student group, this time with a slightly more refined starting point that incorporates the round of feedback from the lecturers, but still with the expectation that the document is a draft proposal seeking modifications. And of course a decision on the pending proposal for the third year. Then we will be ready for the hard work of matching groups of people with the different topics and unleashing them on the development and coordination of the detailed learning segments. And that, I think, is where the fun will really start…

As a no-longer-very-junior Professor, who is (I think) not entirely unreasonable in meetings, I spend a large and increasing fraction of my time serving on scientific advisory and steering boards. If you will permit me one small grumble, I’m convinced that I do this far more than my male colleagues now that many institutions aim for a bit of gender balance on such committees (which is of course a good thing) but didn’t yet get around to hiring a gender-balanced cohort of faculty (which is a bad thing). But that is a topic for another occasion.

So, when embarking on our curriculum revision, the question of how we could most effectively benefit from external expert input immediately came to mind. Since our Department is composed (by construction) entirely of academics, it was clear to us that our weakest internal aspect is the industry perspective, and that our advisors should have strong industry representation. We decided that a good source of advice would be our alumni, both for their familiarity with our existing program, and because they have a vested interest in seeing the value of an ETH Materials degree remain high! And since we envisage a relationship along the lines of an ongoing feedback from a group that we can bounce our ideas off, rather than a more formal advisory or consultancy role, we settled on an “Alumni Sounding Board” as the appropriate forum.

Our Educational Developer, Sara, is an active member (and former president) of our Materials Alumni society, and so was able to identify potential Sounding Board members, spanning recent and less-recent graduates from a wide range of small and large companies with diverse expertise. Everyone who we asked agreed enthusiastically to join, and we now have a Board of eight members representing Sika, QUO, RUAG Space , Sonova, ABB, Straumann and the Swiss Society for Materials Science and Technology, as well as our sister Institute, EPFL. Interestingly, one alumnus, from a company that now employs many of our graudates, agreed to join because he finds our existing graduates so well prepared that he wants to make sure we don’t mess up.

In preparation for our first meeting last month we thought hard about what input would be most useful to us at this stage of our process, and how we could most effectively use the time of our Board members. We settled on the following questions for a specific feedback:

– From your personal experience as a student, what experience/knowledge stuck with you from your studies and what did you forget quickly? Looking back, is there anything you feel that you should have learned which was not included, or conversely anything you would omit?

– As an employer, do you find qualities in Materials Scientists from other study programs that you find lacking in our graduates from ETH Zurich?

– (a tough one!) How would you expect your own job profile to develop over the next ten to fifteen years? What skills will become more important?

and met one evening from 5-7pm at ETH to discuss these topics in depth. Discussions continued less formally over dinner in a very pleasant local (in spite of its being called Ticino Grotto) restaurant.

Of course we received many diverse opinions and ideas, but consensus was largely reached on the following comments. The most long-lasting learning experiences were the thorough grounding in the basics (concepts and terminology of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, especially Analysis & Mechanics) as well as the practical experiences in projects and practicals and connections to applications through guest lecturers from industry. Many of our board felt that a stronger focus on programming techniques and practicalities of coding (in Matlab, Python, Excel, CAD, etc.) would have been useful. Our Board was about as poor as we have been ourselves in suggesting what could be omitted with no real agreement; one Board Member mentioned that he had never used the concept of the Brillouin Zone since the exam. in his Materials Physics class but of course I immediately discounted leaving that out… From an employer’s perspective, our students could benefit from a stronger engineering background, in particular in construction and design and “engineering thinking”, although I’m not sure we converged on exactly what that involves. Interestingly, our graduates were criticised for their insecurity in making decisions, for example in writing materials requirements or considering budget and deadlines; moving beyond assessing and analyzing the pros and cons is not something we prepare them well for (another great German word for this one: they lack “Entscheidungsfähigkeit”). Our Board Members found the 10-15 years question as difficult to answer as I do: Overall they expect their projects to become shorter and more diverse and the pace to become faster, so that both a broad basic education is very important and interconnected thinking will become more important.

All very useful feedback which we now work to incorporate in the first draft of our new curriculum that we hope to have ready soon. And a very pleasant evening with brilliant and interesting people who have gone on to do great things since they left the ETH. Even though most of them had already graduated before I arrived, I couldn’t help feeling a bit of institutional pride. And I now understand better the comment that our graduates are already so good we must be careful not to mess things up with our curriculum revision.

Every summer I promise myself that I will start the Fall Semester so well prepared that I will not reach Christmas in a state of organizational meltdown, surrounded by backlogs of reviews, student projects waiting for feedback, unread literature, ungraded homeworks and neglected committee assignments, and suffering from diseases caused by deficiencies of vitamins that are not contained in take-out sushi. And every year I fail. This year I am doing particularly poorly because I had been happily delusional (or if you’re feeling kind, optimistic) about the time demands of a curriculum revision. And so, in the triage of abandoning anything non-life-threatening, or at least not shouting at me the loudest, this blog lost out.

But here I am on an 8-hour flight to the Materials Research Society Fall meeting in Boston with tomorrow’s talk prepared, and a lot to tell you about.

Let’s begin with the BSc Profile. Our idea with the BSc Profile was to produce a document with an amount of detail somewhere between the Qualification Profile — which is a short summary of our graduates’ competences and knowledge — and the learning outcomes for each course. We wanted to articulate both subject-specific and non-subject specific (the “nicht-fachliche Kompetenzen” I mentioned last time) components so as to have a working document to guide us as we develop the details of the curriculum. While we certainly expect that the BSc Profile will evolve as we flesh out the curriculum, a rather thorough statement giving us a common ground to start from seemed like a good plan.

Our approach was to produce a draft among the core project team as an input for colleagues to comment on. While this felt like a lot of work for a small number of people at the start, I think it was quite an efficient choice; the discussions with the entire faculty could immediately be concrete.

We found that we continually needed to remind ourselves that we are revising only the BSc curriculum, and that our students have another two years of training at the Masters level before they are unleashed into the community as practicing Materials Scientists. So we decided to start with a kind of “executive summary” to help us remember that we don’t need to pack every possible topic into the first three years of study:

“The Bachelor’s degree provides students with the fundamentals of material science and engineering, giving the students a toolbox to design new materials or to select existing materials for engineering applications, and prepares them for advanced studies in materials science and engineering.”

Then we divided the profile into three sections:

Domain-specific knowledge and understanding

Analytical and design skills

Personal and social competences

The domain-specific section starts with quantitative and qualitative problem solving in the basics of chemistry, physics, engineering and mathematics. Then the topics that distinguish us from those specialities: Structure formation, structure-property-processing relationships, thermodynamics and kinetics (all of those phase diagrams), characteristics of various materials, and simple material design problems.

We grouped the analytical and design skills broadly into characterizing, modeling, making and selecting materials. First, we decided that our graduates should be able to characterize the composition and structure of materials from the atomic to the macroscopic level. To do this they will need to be able to explain how common chemical, mechanical, microscopic, spectroscopic and electronic characterization methods work, interpret data collected with those characterization methods and choose the appropriate method for determining a particular property. On the modeling side, they should understand the approximations and applicability of various modeling and simulation methods so that they can select and apply a suitable approach to solve a given problem. Our graduates should be able to carry out simple laboratory syntheses, and describe processing and manufacturing routes for common materials. For materials selection, they should understand the materials (and associated environmental and economic) challenges posed by common applications, and be able to analyze failure of components, so that they can evaluate an interdisciplinary problem and derive and implement a solution. Finally, they should be able to build, adapt and program simple equipment or parts of equipment. I have the feeling that we will find that we’ve been a bit ambitious with this section, and might need to rethink some of the huge volume of content, or at least the level at which we include it, later.

For the personal and social competences, we decided to focus on more “technical” aspects such as lab safety, record keeping, data analysis, literature comparison, presentation and discussions skills and good scientific practice, saving areas such as project design, team skills and leadership for the Masters level. Here I think we have been quite realistic with what skills can be developed in the time available.

In the end we left some things undecided, feeling we could make a more informed decision when we have a more complete picture of the overall curriculum structure. In particular, how much biology and computer programming to include, as well as which materials applications to focus on will be decided later. We also have quite a few gray areas (and even some disagreements) regarding the division between BSc and MSc competences, and I’m sure there will be some shuffling back and forth of topics at that boundary over the next months. Overall, though, I’m convinced that we have a good solid “launch pad” for the next step of fleshing out the detailed curriculum.

Ooof, now some recommendation letters are clamouring loudly for attention. So the stories from our stimulating and instructive meeting with our Alumni Sounding Board will have to wait until next time…

Our studies coordinator, Andrea, had a busy summer interviewing the people who hire our graduates; she talked to industry representatives in both management and research and development roles, as well as human resources personnel, from a wide range of different companies with different specialities. Now that we are all back from Summer travels, and have survived the first week of the new academic year, we spent our latest curriculum team meeting poring over her findings.

First of all, I should say that we were enormously encouraged and grateful to find so many very busy people willing to donate their time to help us with our curriculum revision process; it’s clear that the professional community genuinely cares about our program and our graduates. We were a little bit flattered too, at their enthusiasm for the technical and scientific competencies of our graduates. All of the employers emphasized the excellent reputation of our institute, the rigorous education in fundamentals that our graduates are renowned for, their extensive practical and laboratory skills and the “swiss quality” of our brand. So far, so good.

I was personally astonished, though, at their astonishment that we would want to change anything. In fact many employers even seemed somewhat concerned that we might be about to really mess things up. I learned that many aspects of our program that we consider a bit unmodern — “traditional” materials science such as empirical processing methods, or the division of knowledge into materials “classes” rather than cross-cutting concepts — are considered strengths. And that the details of the new stuff that we had planned to teach our students — environmental issues and sustainability for example — are not terribly important to our employers, and certainly not at the expense of a rigorous training in basics. Maybe the time for post-modernism in Materials education has not yet come?

When pressed further, however, the topic of skills beyond the technical (the german phrase for this — nicht-fachliche Kompetenzen — is fabulous) came up repeatedly. The importance of teamwork, communication and presentation skills, industrial internship experience, goal-setting and self-learning, and so on. These are certainly competencies that we plan to address with project-based learning approaches. Inter-cultural competencies and language skills were also mentioned; it will be challenging to incorporate these into the time available for the degree, assuming that my North-of-England heritage and dialect is not what they had in mind.

The criticism that I am struggling with most, which came up repeatedly, is that our graduates are too picky, in that they expect work that is too interesting and salaries that are too high. Now while we of course don’t want to be releasing cohorts of arrogant prima donnas into the workforce (and as a newcomer to Switzerland I can objectively say that swissness is antithetical to primadonnaness), a bit of pickiness in terms of how interesting one’s work should be strikes me as something we should be trying to nurture rather than discourage. I can wish nothing better for our graduates than that they find stimulating and interesting ways to contribute to society. And I see no downside to our women graduates in particular (finally) negotiating aggressively for their starting salaries. But that is a subject for another very long discussion…

Whenever you have a hard problem to solve, check first whether someone has already solved it.

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel (and hoping to benefit from the hard work of others) we decided to take a look at the processes used by other Materials departments to introduce project-based learning into their programs. Feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed after vacation (recommendation: If you missed last month’s total eclipse of the sun, absolutely go and see the next one) we started analyzing the data generously collected by my colleague Markus Niederberger over the summer.

I recommend this exercise to anyone feeling a bit disenchanted with higher education: The worldwide level of effort, enthusiasm and rigor that is being invested in developing stimulating programs to best facilitate student learning dispels any skepticism regarding the commitment of University Professors to teaching. Perhaps not surprisingly there is tremendous creativity too, with a wide range of approaches and implementations designed to accommodate different student backgrounds and to meet different educational goals.

Perhaps the most dramatic is the approach of University of Twente, which has adopted an entirely modular curriculum structure they call the Twente Educational Model, or TOM (because “Educational” starts with an “O” in Dutch). Each module includes a variety of teaching and learning formats, technical subjects and assessment modes, has a project about a real-world problem at its core and follows a student-driven learning approach in which students reflect on where they need faculty input in order to meet the learning objectives. It sounds absolutely fabulous (there are some nice “personal interest” stories here) and in my next life I will definitely choose this program for my own studies. (At least as long as there’s some plate tectonic activity in the meantime to arrange for some better mountains nearby). It’s on a bit of a grander scale than we can take on in our current curriculum revision — to be effective I think it needs an entire institutional change — but maybe our DMATL efforts can provide a step in this direction for the ETH.

Most helpful for us is the experience of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which adopted a similar approach to that which is emerging in our own discussions, and did a tremendous public service by thoroughly documenting it. (See for example R. N. Savage, K. C. Chen and L. Vanasupa, Integrating project-based learning throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum, Journal of STEM Education 8, 1 (2007) and K. C. Chen et al., Creating a project-based curriculum in materials engineering, Journal of Materials Education 31, 37 (2009).) At Cal Poly an increasing fraction of credits is spent on projects in each academic year, starting with a small-scale community service project (for example the design and implementation of a solar water system for a local elementary school) in the first year and culminating with an industry-sponsored design project before graduation. The projects are balanced with traditional lecture & laboratory learning activities and assessments. Their list of ongoing challenges — designing suitable projects, assessment techniques, team teaching, resisting overstuffing the curriculum and so on — is a bit daunting but their conclusion that these are outweighed by the benefits is reassuring.

And there are many other approaches too — ranging from the largely extracurriculuar Center for Engineering Innovation and Design at Yale University for example, to an almost entirely project-based syllabus at Olin College of Engineering. Our challenge now is to figure out which combination of approaches will work best in the ETH context. How best to help young people who have grown up in the unique Swiss social, cultural and economic environment to become the best possible citizens for Zürich, Switzerland, Europe and the world…